A SHORTER HISTORY OF ENGLAND
uprising in Brussels. Here Clericals and Anti-clericals combined
in defence of a common culture, and drove the Dutch garrison
out of the capital of Belgium. All that part of the country
formerly the Spanish and Austrian Netherlands, which had
refused to accept Calvinism was determined to be rid of the
Dutch, who were soon reduced to no more than the citadel of
Antwerp. But this emancipation of Catholic Belgium was a
serious blow to England's general policy. There was a triple
danger in it. It might lead to the choice of a French dynasty and,
ultimately, to amalgamation with France, so that Antwerp and
the Belgian shores opposite England would be in the hands of a
Great Power—as they had been under Napoleon, Alternatively
the Holy Alliance, were it to interfere, might throw the whole
weight of Prussia into Belgium to effect its desire of restoring
the arrangements made by the treaty fifteen years before. In this
case another Great Power, Prussia, would be holding Antwerp
and the Belgian coasts. There remained a third possibility, dis-
tasteful to England and opposed to her policy, but the least
of the three evils: the setting up of an independent Belgium
under some local dynasty that should not be attached to any
Great Power. The English Government, under Wellington and
with Aberdeen for its Foreign Minister, was against accepting
what had happened in any form; but England had not the
military power to occupy Belgium and restore it to Dutch role-
had she attempted that France would certainly have moved. In
the long-run England found herself on the side of the French
in the matter, and, after a preliminary danger of a French prince
being elected King of Belgium had been escaped, English ships
co-operated with the French fleet in compelling the Dutch to
give up the citadel of Antwerp, the siege of which lasted from
October to December 1832.
The Reform BilL The third effect of the French Revolution
of 1830 was the bringing to a head and deciding of English
constitutional reform. There had been for a lifetime increasing
discontent, among the middle classes and the now expanding
industrial towns, with the almost immemorial Parliamentary
franchise of England. That franchise was based upon the forty-
shilling freeholder. And the forty-shilling freeholder had meant
in the Middle Ages, when Parliaments were first brought into
this country from France, the mass of the yeomen and the
squires above the yeomen—* forty-shilling' meaning then roughly
56*